XSLT could be used to convert virtually any xml table format directly
into an insert statement. For me, this is better than using a
programming language plus a parser. XSLT is quite powerful and fast and
is build on top of xpath, and is a closer fit to the declarative
programming model of sql. Validation could be done at the xslt stage or
with schemas, which I prefer.
> Acually, the difficult part has been getting the information back
> into the database. Getting it out is a very simple query. I imagine
> that every language/environment has an SQL->XML library somewhere,
> but I wasn't able to find something that would go from XML to SQL.
>